Last week's column commented upon a nutrition report created by a government advisory committee to aid in the creation of this year's dietary guidelines. It challenges the current beliefs on egg consumption, coffee ingestion, and salt use.

I noted that the seemingly never-ending changes to what's considered healthy eating and what's not causes many people to give up the good fight, and simply surrender.They surrender to taste, convenience, the whims of profit-seeking food producers and create a jail cell of jiggly flesh whose wardens are limited breath, general malaise, premature fatigue, and low self-esteem.But this does not need to be.While it is best to be aware of the latest research and seriously consider it, you do not need to be beholden to it. Your dietary pattern should be directed by something else.I call the something else "personal constants," the nutritional strategies you discover work for you through trial-and-error experimentation.The problem with suggesting the trial-and-error method is the time it requires. Fortunately, certain scientific elements are universally true, so you can start with those, ensuring moderate success immediately with the long-term goal of fine-tuning your food intake to creating an optimal eating pattern.One such constant is what I call the 4-4-9 ratio. The numbers represent the calories found in one gram of protein, carbohydrate, and fat, and serves as the bedrock for all low-fat diets.Today's column will not advocate low-fat dieting, but it will explain how the key element to it, the 4-4-9 ratio, can be implemented into any eating plan.One gram of both protein and carbohydrates contains 4 calories. One gram of fat contains 9, more than double the amount. As a result of this indisputable science, a meal high in fat has to be higher in calories than one higher in protein and carbs.Eat less fat; consume fewer calories. It's as simple as that.Now there is another scientifically accepted constant that initially appears to contradict the 4-4-9 ratio, but actually supports it. Science has shown that the body digests and utilizes each of those three macronutrients, protein, carbohydrates, and fats differently, so in terms of weight loss, maintenance, or even gain, calories are not equal.The body does not turn protein into energy efficiently, so there's a significant "waste" of calories, sometimes as high as 30 percent.Here's simple way to consider this: Scramble 6 egg-whites in a non-stick pan and eat them, and you've ingested 100 calories of pure protein. But until your body breaks down that protein to use it including as the tertiary energy source 30 calories are lost in the process that's also relatively lengthy.Combine those two elements and it's easy to see why eating a high-than-normal amount of protein during weight loss expedites the process. Moreover, the macronutrient that contains the most calories per gram, fat, not only is the one that requires the least amount of energy to digest it (no more than 3 percent of the fat calories ingested), but it also gets preferentially stored as body fat.In other words, the body is geared to store dietary fat as body fat.How your body handles carbohydrates is a matter of type. Complex carbs, natural unprocessed carbohydrates found in vegetables, grains, beans, lentils, are called complex because of their chemical bond, a bond that requires more time for the digestive system to break down; hence, digestion slows. Carb energy called glucose is added to the blood incrementally, and insulin secretion the excess of which creates blood sugar to be taken from the blood and stored as fat is moderate.But the processing food manufacturers do often transforms a complex carb into a simple one; furthermore, processed foods often contain added sugars. These processed carbs and sugars are simple carbohydrates.Their chemical structures are relatively simple, so they digest quickly.Now glucose enters the bloodstream in a rush and the body responds by releasing a larger-than-normal amount of insulin. The insulin takes virtually all of the blood sugar away. After attempting to drop its load in muscles, an attempt that is denied unless the muscle cells are low on glycogen (the name for stored glucose), insulin escorts to glucose to the fat stores for eventual use.But that is not the only reason why consuming simple carbohydrates is an easy way to gain body fat. The final indignity lies in the efficient way in which insulin does its job. It rids the blood of blood sugar so well that you feel as hungry as you did before the meal of mainly simple carbohydrates no less than 90 minutes after eating it.So you eat again. The hunger is not from a lack of will but rather a prior inappropriate dietary decision.If you apply these dietary constants and weigh (or at the very least log) the foods that you consume throughout the day, you can disregard those bestselling diet books and create a personal one. Ultimately, you'll have more control and almost certainly more success in the process.